Shallow Grave

Shallow Grave, British director Danny Boyle’s debut feature film, is about the disintegration of friendship under the strain of greed. It’s also a bleak social study of three bright but blinded intellectuals who’ve allowed callous opportunism defeat any moral grounding. It’s certainly a daring, hard-edged low-budget thriller that paints a dark, almost dangerous view, of the young, middle-class characters it portrays. But it’s also a very astute investigation of the primal forces that drive human beings. Indeed, the three main characters display the primitive form of Freud’s theory of personality development when they allow their moral judgment to be governed by the pleasure of having lots and lots of money. (READ MORE)

Influence of the Hollywood strudio system 1930 to 1940

The ‘Studio System’ during the 1930s strangled independent cinema and took such great liberties to turn a profit that creativity was severely compromised. The ‘Studio System’ was run by the producer’s that worked within it, and the films that they produced were under their total control. The creative driving force behind movies that were later seen, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, of the directors and writers, was generally lost to the ‘system’. What directors complained about was an objection to the ‘adaptation of Hollywood to a decentralised management system first introduced to American industry by general motors in the 1920s, and itself evidence of the studios assertion of their existence as industry rather than art form.’ (Maltby, 1995. pg. 85) The producers, once assigned to a project, would hire directors and writers to work under them, but as producers supervised all aspects of production from writing and shooting through to editing, writers and directors argued for change and creative freedom that eliminated ‘the involved, complicated, and expensive system of supervision which separates the director and writer from the responsible executive producers’. (Maltby, 1995. pg 83) The Screen Director’s Guild condemned those producers who ‘have little respect for the medium, less respect for their audiences and excuse their lack of imagination by ridiculing it in others.’ (Maltby, 1995. pg. 83) Producers were involved in more than one film at a time, sometimes three or four... (READ MORE)

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Alien in the monstorus grasp of womankind

This essay investigates feminist theory towards Ridley Scott's Alien with reference to Laura Mulvey and Barbara Creed. (READ FULL ESSAY)

Looking at feminist writer Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the classical Hollywood film it is interesting how Alien (Scott, 1979) defies her claims about scopophilia, in that the film both subverts her ideas about voyeuristic visual pleasure and narcissistic visual pleasure. (Mulvey, 1975/1989, pg. 353) Mulvey claims that scopophilia (the desire to see) is a fundamental drive according to Freud and that it is sexual in nature. Therefore film uses this in two ways – one is that of voyeurism, both of character, figure and situation, and the second is that of narcissism within the story and the image. She sees scopophilia as a structure that functions on an axis of activity and passivity and that this is gendered. From a voyeuristic point of view, her analysis of classical Hollywood film established ‘the male character as active and powerful: he is the agent around whom the dramatic action unfolds and the look gets organised. The female character is passive and powerless: she is the object of desire for the male character.’ (Mulvey, 1975/1989, pg. 353) This appears to be reversed in Alien as the active and powerful character who defeats the alien and outlives all, including the men, is female. Furthermore, the dramatic action unfolds around her, and the male characters are presented as weak – Captain Dallas makes mistakes, he breaks quarantine laws and cannot protect his team, eventually dying; and robot Ash, whose look and appearance is that of a man, malfunctions and fails his duties. From a narcissistic point of view, Mulvey argues that the audience is forced to see the male character as the powerful, idealised one over the female because she cites Lacan’s concepts of ego formation as the driving force. Lacan claimed that a child derives pleasure from a perfect mirror image of itself and forms its ‘ego’ based on that idealised image. Mulvey therefore says, the ‘representation of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego of the male hero stands in stark opposition to the distorted image of the passive and powerless female character.’ (Mulvey, 1975/1989, pg. 354)

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Good source for essays about cinema

Cinema Review - a blog that archives the best film theory and criticism essays found around the web.

1980s Classic Vol. 1: Withnail and I

For many, the first introduction to Bruce Robinson’s tale of friendship at the end of the ‘greatest decade in history’, appears not in the form of a video, a curry, and a group of mates, but by the discovery of an intoxicated body lying forlornly on the living room floor. ‘What happened here,’ someone will ask, to hear the reply: ‘He was playing the Withnail and I drinking game.’ Of course, anyone not familiar with the film might not immediately see the significance until reminded, ‘you know, the one where you drink every time Richard E. Grant drowns his sorrows in either alcohol or lighter fuel. Of course, the lighter fuel must be reserved only for terminal cases and those who can’t afford the alcohol.’

Of course many associate the film with student life. The living in squalor – the kitchen with an ever-growing tower of dirty dishes turning last weeks leftover chips and gravy into new life forms, larger with every day, seeking south for winter. It’s easy for your average student to take one look at the greasy stove and congregation of plates and cutlery (that are beginning to smell like a morgue) and decide to ‘sort it out tomorrow’. It’s even easier to start watching ‘Withnail and I’ trying to sort out their own messy sink because at least you get to keep your hands clean and have a few laughs for good measure.

Released in 1987, ‘Withnail and I’ was, during its production, hampered by a producer who couldn’t see the merits of the film, and a director who admitted he didn’t really know what he was doing. Bruce Robinson, by this time, had already accomplished himself as a writer. He’d been nominated for both Oscar and Bafta awards for his screenplay The Killing Fields which looked at the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from the experiences of three journalists. Yet, his real passion was acting, or at least that was until he became disillusioned with whole practice after spending years being rejected and having to live off the state. However, since he couldn’t make it as an actor, he decided he may well profit from telling the story of his trials and tribulations. That’s where the genesis for ‘Withnail and I’ came from. But, Robinson’s script takes more from the essence of the period, and the way he was feeling at the time, than from any one situation. The film doesn’t rely on strong plotting, it relies on characters in a predicament; friendship in a world of confusion, counter-culture, and loss.

READ THE FULL REVIEW - CLICK HERE

TOP 10 1980s Coming of Age Films

The 1980s produced some of the best teen movies in cinema history. The video generation fondly remember such classics as The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Some Kind Of Wonderful, and Stand By Me. Yet, many forgotten greats are just as good such as John Cusack in Better Off Dead or The Sure Thing.

What are your favourite teen films from the 1980s? View Strange Conversation's Top 10 coming of age films - JUST CLICK HERE!

Latest Essays

Not just another dead soldier: Subjectivity in Saving Private Ryan

In Saving Private Ryan, ‘focalisation’ forms a major part of the narrative as it ‘shapes our perception of the fabula [story]’[1]. The way in which it does this is by omitting story information in the plot to create a focal point for the narrative. As we are introduced to Captain Miller, the main character of the film, we are immediately focused on his part of the overall story. This is only a minor part of the focalisation that the narrative creates, because through the suppression of gaps we are quickly told who is on the side of the ‘bad’, and who is on the side of the ‘good’. In the initial battle sequence we know German soldiers must be dying. We see them shooting, yet this is all we see. This suppression of gaps helps focalise the story on Miller and the Americans while delineating a divide between what the plot believes are the good and bad. The gap however is temporary, as we see dead German bodies being searched and/or moved. We fill in the gap that other German soldiers must have died in the firefight previous. Although the gap is suppressed, ‘surprise’ is not its goal which is usually a major use of the suppressed gap. In this case, the gap (which we can imagine would be German soldiers screaming in pain, and dying in much the same way as the Americans) localises our attention on the American soldier’s deaths. It creates a causal relationship in that the ‘barbaric’ German bullets kill the ‘helpless but heroic’ Americans. Therefore when, in this case, we fill in the gap, through the subjective view presented to us, the dead German soldiers are mere trophies of the ‘heroic’ American’s who have survived this long. Because of this set-up, when American soldiers later kill surrendering Germans there is less a sense of reversed-barbarism more an awful feeling of payback. The cause and effect of the events presented in the first battle work on the audiences generic expectations of a war movie, and reinforce the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ divides. As mentioned, it is very subjective as we are told who is ‘good’ and who is ‘bad’. (READ FULL ESSAY - CLICK HERE)

Latest reviews

Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle, 1994, UK)

Shallow Grave, British director Danny Boyle’s debut feature film, is about the disintegration of friendship under the strain of greed. It’s also a bleak social study of three bright but blinded intellectuals who’ve allowed callous opportunism defeat any moral grounding. It’s certainly a daring, hard-edged low-budget thriller that paints a dark, almost dangerous view, of the young, middle-class characters it portrays. But it’s also a very astute investigation of the primal forces that drive human beings. Indeed, the three main characters display the primitive form of Freud’s theory of personality development when they allow their moral judgment to be governed by the pleasure of having lots and lots of money. (READ FULL REVIEW)

The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006, USA)

I looked at the running time before beginning to watch Martin Scorsese’s 2006 crime-drama and thought it might be too long. My girlfriend certainly thought so – she was asleep after half an hour and woke up with about forty minutes left. As I tried to bring her up to speed with what had happened, I found myself breathlessly retelling events without a pit-stop for oxygen or chance for her to really take it all in. When I finally said, ‘so that’s it, I’ll just pause it and go for a wee,’ I realised I was on the edge of my seat (an exceptionally comfortable sofa) and had been for the past hour and a half. As I relieved myself of half a bottle of wine I knew, as I reminisced about the film, I was experiencing Scorsese’s most polished and entertaining film since Goodfellas. (READ FULL REVIEW)

The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006, UK)

Not that I can fault Helen Mirren who deserves her Academy Award for best performance. Her portrayal of the Queen is mannered and at times amusing. Yet, putting the royal family into a drama about tragedy and loss is both over-sentimentalising a relic that doesn’t deserve such attention, and caricaturing famed figures whose lives are already constructs of media derision and, at times, fascination. It’s most telling that Alistair Campbell’s scorn and egocentric asides are the most truthful and believable attributes of a film that first asks its audience to suspend their disbelief, and then asks us to suspend our disbelief for the over-privileged, out-of-date, out-of-touch royal family. When it comes to the second part, it becomes increasingly difficult and awfully easy to find ‘oneself’ shouting words like ‘robots’ and ‘who are ya’ at the screen. (READ FULL REVIEW)

Welcome to Strange Conversation

Strange Conversation was the brain child of film critic Daniel Stephens who, after finding the trials and tribulations of reviewing DVDs for a living a little constraining, wanted to expand his love and enthusiasm for film to all facets of cinema. Inspired by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate who said, 'This conversation is getting a little strange', the bimonthly film journal Strange Conversation was born. With weekly updates and a round-up every two months, Strange Conversation is packed with a love of cinema that is sometimes lost online. Featuring past and present film reviews, shot of the month, scene of the month, diverse Top 10 selections, biographies, film history and theory essays covering everything from feminism, genre, and the film industry, to short film and foreign cinema, you're bound to find something of interest.

This blog will feature the best-of from the magazine with constant updates.

Strange Conversation is written entirely by a film fan, for film fans. Visit now at www.filmjournal.net/danielstephens